Off Topic Politics Thread

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ChilcoSaint said:
Where things went badly wrong was after the 2017 general election, when May lost her majority. She should have formed a Commission to find the best compromise solution from all parties in the House of Commons before going to Brussels.
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I totally agree with this. But we are where we are, none of the political class have covered themselves in glory on this issue. We certainly should not have triggered Article 50 until we had a very clear line of approach. The 400 plus MP’s who nodded it through did not test the readiness of the Government at the time to enter a negotiation. I certainly supported the view that if all negotiations proved pointless, then the EU at that point would know we would leave, but we never had the ducks lined up and they (EU) knew that Theresa May didn’t believe what she said about ‘no deal’. Listening to Cameron’s original Downing Street announcement about the decision to hold the referendum reminded me why I voted to remain. Since then I have moved to a soft leaver as I’m now convinced that his hope of reform etc within the the EU, which I believe he thought would take place, therefore better in than out for the UK, is not going to happen.
 
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ChilcoSaint said:
First of all, I was unhappy that the referendum was ever called. No one, or only a tiny fraction of the population, wanted to leave the EU until the spectre of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive reared its head. Then, suddenly, Farage and the ERG, funded by the likes of Arron Banks and other super-rich figures, started eating into David Cameron’s pact with the Lib Dem’s and he decided to make a referendum part of the 2015 manifesto.

Secondly, the whole referendum campaign was flawed in the extreme: Cameron as leader of Remain, was shambolic and uninterested and couldn’t be bothered to appear on TV debates, and the Leave campaign was criminally fraudulent. The fact that Leave won an extremely narrow majority was, at least partly, due to illegal targeting of floating voters by millions of personalised tweets and Facebook posts. As I said earlier, the referendum would have been declared null and void by the Electoral Commission if it hadn’t been constituted as a purely advisory plebiscite. To his shame, Jeremy Corbyn wanted the new Prime Minister Theresa May to invoke Article 50 straight away, and she would have done but for the heroic legal battle won by Gina Miller, which forced the calling of Article 50 to be voted through in Parliament, which it very sadly was in March 2017.

Thirdly, the expectation of many people who voted Leave was that we would merely be leaving the political union, and still remaining linked with our largest trading partner via the Single Market and the Customs Union. This, by the way, would have meant no change to the “soft” border in Ireland. Theresa May, again at the behest of the right wing of her party, wanted nothing to do with either the SM or the CU, and her red lines led to the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement which, because of the perfectly reasonable Irish Backstop, was opposed by the ERG, and because it didn’t guarantee workers’ rights enjoyed within the EU would be protected once we left, and because we were out of the SM and CU, was opposed by everyone else except May’s own government.

The truth about Brexit and all its ramifications has slowly become clearer. In a nutshell, whichever form Brexit takes, we will be worse off. The only people to benefit will be the super-rich who won’t have their offshore assets taxed. Everyone else, everyone who reads this, every hospital patient waiting for an operation, every sheep farmer trying to sell their sheep to Europe, every worker in a car factory waiting for components held up by Customs checks, every single person in these islands and the rest of the EU will be worse off.

Time to have a second referendum with all the facts clear I’d say.
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That about sums it up.
 
Long before he was an international pariah, he was responsible for the death and torture of tens of thousands, but no one particularly cared because he was targeting other black Zimbabweans.

Robert Mugabe could have been a great man. He chose to be a powerful one. It's a shame this day didn't come much sooner.
 
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StJabbo1 said:
Thanks again Chilcs, chilling and even more reason to extend until the end of the year possibly beyond
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Yes, indeed, because the High Court case to nullify the result of the referendum doesn’t start until 7th December, so if we’ve left by then it will be even more of a mess.

I’m looking forward to Brexiters replacing “the will of the people” with “the will of Vladimir Putin”!
 
ChilcoSaint said:
First of all, I was unhappy that the referendum was ever called. No one, or only a tiny fraction of the population, wanted to leave the EU until the spectre of the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive reared its head. Then, suddenly, Farage and the ERG, funded by the likes of Arron Banks and other super-rich figures, started eating into David Cameron’s pact with the Lib Dem’s and he decided to make a referendum part of the 2015 manifesto.

Secondly, the whole referendum campaign was flawed in the extreme: Cameron as leader of Remain, was shambolic and uninterested and couldn’t be bothered to appear on TV debates, and the Leave campaign was criminally fraudulent. The fact that Leave won an extremely narrow majority was, at least partly, due to illegal targeting of floating voters by millions of personalised tweets and Facebook posts. As I said earlier, the referendum would have been declared null and void by the Electoral Commission if it hadn’t been constituted as a purely advisory plebiscite. To his shame, Jeremy Corbyn wanted the new Prime Minister Theresa May to invoke Article 50 straight away, and she would have done but for the heroic legal battle won by Gina Miller, which forced the calling of Article 50 to be voted through in Parliament, which it very sadly was in March 2017.

Thirdly, the expectation of many people who voted Leave was that we would merely be leaving the political union, and still remaining linked with our largest trading partner via the Single Market and the Customs Union. This, by the way, would have meant no change to the “soft” border in Ireland. Theresa May, again at the behest of the right wing of her party, wanted nothing to do with either the SM or the CU, and her red lines led to the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement which, because of the perfectly reasonable Irish Backstop, was opposed by the ERG, and because it didn’t guarantee workers’ rights enjoyed within the EU would be protected once we left, and because we were out of the SM and CU, was opposed by everyone else except May’s own government.

The truth about Brexit and all its ramifications has slowly become clearer. In a nutshell, whichever form Brexit takes, we will be worse off. The only people to benefit will be the super-rich who won’t have their offshore assets taxed. Everyone else, everyone who reads this, every hospital patient waiting for an operation, every sheep farmer trying to sell their sheep to Europe, every worker in a car factory waiting for components held up by Customs checks, every single person in these islands and the rest of the EU will be worse off.

Time to have a second referendum with all the facts clear I’d say.
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An absolutely fantastic post mate, sums up the ridiculous situation perfectly.
 
ChilcoSaint said:
Yes, indeed, because the High Court case to nullify the result of the referendum doesn’t start until 7th December, so if we’ve left by then it will be even more of a mess.

I’m looking forward to Brexiters replacing “the will of the people” with “the will of Vladimir Putin”!
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Boris (if he hasn’t resigned) and his little cabal plan to fight the next election under the slogan “Trust The People”.

I don’t trust The People much myself tbh. But will The People trust Boris?
 
Archers Road said:
Boris (if he hasn’t resigned) and his little cabal plan to fight the next election under the slogan “Trust The People”.

I don’t trust The People much myself tbh. But will The People trust Boris?
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Boris, Gove, and Cummings were so closely involved in corruption they should all be thrown in jail.
 
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Archers Road said:
Boris (if he hasn’t resigned) and his little cabal plan to fight the next election under the slogan “Trust The People”.

I don’t trust The People much myself tbh. But will The People trust Boris?
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Thrust the people mmm. The people need a bit of education as to the role of their MP. I've quoted Edmund Burke in past posts but relevant now given the "rebel" tories. Turning in his grave, he'll be doing more revolutions then Shane Warne's finest delivery.

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.

“Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of our nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament”.
 
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StJabbo1 said:
Thrust the people mmm. The people need a bit of education as to the role of their MP. I've quoted Edmund Burke in past posts but relevant now given the "rebel" tories. Turning in his grave, he'll be doing more revolutions then Shane Warne's finest delivery.

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.

“Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of our nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament”.
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Also worth repeating the words of Winston Churchill in “Duties of a Member of Parliament” in 1955. Churchill would be turning in his grave at the shoddy, self-serving scumbags who currently run his party, but would no doubt be proud of his grandson Nicholas Soames and the other Tory rebels who put the nation’s interest first on Wednesday evening:
“The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative but not the delegate. Burke's famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that his duty to party organization or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.”
 
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